I'm a cowboy, always have been, always will be. I don't mean the gunsel, drug store type either. I literally learned to ride a horse before I learned to walk. Momma loved horses, had horses and used to set me on the saddle in front of her when she rode.
I was born in Phoenix Arizona in '59. In '64 mom and dad divorced and we moved to Oregon where mom and her new hubby bought a few dozen acres on which we raised, broke and stabled quarters horses. I learned to ride on my own and my brother and I spent hours in the hills of western Oregon on horseback, on foot, camping and packing out. Guns were a primary part of that upbringing. We learned to handle, shoot and care for those guns just like we did the horses we rode. I've never lost my love, and respect, for either.
I left home in '77 after graduating high school and moved back to Phoenix where my dad lived. After a year I realized that the city wasn't for me. I had burned some bridges and going back to Oregon wasn't in the cards, so I joined the Marines. Because of enlisting in a non-conflict era, I ended up spending four years in a boot camp environment. My job there? Amongst other things, teaching weapons culture & nomenclature. I taught recruits how to break down, service and re-assemble the M16 and the Colt .45.
I left the Marines in '85. But the Marines never left me. Nor did my love of the western way of life. During the next few years, my brother and I would spend many a day and night, moving about in the desert on more modern day "horses" if you will. Four wheel drives and motorcycles got us farther, faster. But we still wore the hats, and pistols were the tool of the day.
I had a favorite in those days. It was a Uberte .357 Magnum. Very rare, it was a single action six shooter manufactured by Italian maker Uberte who sent 600 of them to the U.S. in '28 as potential side arms for cavalry officers. They never took because the Colt .45 1911 came on the scene hard and boxed them out. But it was a fine piece. It broke my heart years later when I lost it to a break in. My point in mentioning it is that pistol spent more time warm from by body temp than my wife.
Over the years that's mostly been the case. These days it's a Springfield Armory V-10 1911 .45ACP.
I picked it up several years ago when I entered a local BLET program. I was working on a Private Investigators license and figured the law enforcement training would be a good place to start. My original intention was to get into private security investigations and threat assessment. Somewhere along the way after graduating the program and getting certification to be a police officer, but never exercising the endorsement, a Bail Bond license and fugitive recovery business got under my feet.
I did that several years before a near miss made me stop to smell some daisy's before I turned up under them. My Marine Corps, BLET and personal skills training stood me in good stead several times over those years, but I figured somewhere along the way odds would pop up against me. Though the incident I'm fixing to describe didn't have much or anything to do with my occupation at the time, the sheer odds of a bad encounter made me juke a different direction. I'm still in the private security business, though a bit more civilized now than then.
I mentioned the western side of me to explain that, from time to time, I still enjoy wearing my Charlie One Horse felt sombrero. Living in North Carolina these days, baseball caps are more the style for equestrians, but I never gained a flavor for them while wearing my boots. The kids in the neighborhood got a big kick out of the cowboy hat and took to calling me Garth shortly after we moved in.
In the summer of 2004, late on a weekend night, I was waiting for my daughter to come home from a date. She was pushing curfew and I was sitting on the front porch in a fine state of pisstivity. She eventually married the boy so I'll have to say he survived the night. They make songs about stuff like that but this was real life.
Like always I was packing. I have several handguns which I change out from time to time depending on the circumstances. That night I had been at my church with some of the men so my carry was on the lite side. I had a Bersa .380. It's kind of a Walther PPK James Bond type 9mm knockoff. Nice pistol, but inexpensive and easy to conceal. I had it in an open paddle holster on my right hip.
To keep my mind off of the ticking clock I had been whittling on a cedar staff I'd cut from the church property a few weeks prior. It was about four feet long and shaped kinda like a samurai sword. I like to hike so the staff was shaping up to be a useful tool on the trail.
Somewhere in the midst of my grumbling and the whittling, I heard a dirt bike start up just down the block. Not unusual for a bike, but an unmuzzled one at 11:45 at night was on the obnoxious order. Not only did it start up, but it continued to rev up until it was tacking out. I thought at first it was throttle stuck but it kept going on and on. Anybody with any brains would have killed the ignition if it looked like it was going to blow up.
I had hedges at the time, so I'll walked down the path to the break and peaked around the corner. Maybe two houses down to the left, in the middle of the street was an idiot with his front brake locked and the back wheel just a smokin' doing a burn-out.
Now mind you, this is 11:45 on Sunday night. I still had the staff in my hand so I walked out into the middle of the street and gave the pin-head an arm spread gesture of WTF?? He had a cloud of smoke billowing out around him and a pile of rubber six inches high behind the rear tire. Looking up at me he released the brake, popped a wheelie and started down the road in my general direction. It's a residential street and fairly narrow so with me standing in the middle there wasn't much room to go around, especially at the speed he was moving.
Sometimes common sense and I part ways. This was one of those times. I refused to back down and postured myself to use the staff as a baseball bat to knock him off as he went by. He dropped the front wheel at the last moment, veered and boogied on down the street. I stood and listened as his bike Dopplered off into the distance. After a couple of minutes I made my way back to the porch, shaking my head on the way at the stupidity of some people...not altogether meaning just him.
I had no more than sat back down when I heard the incoming Doppler of his bike again...or one sounding a lot like it. "Surely", I said to myself, "this idiot won't come back into the neighborhood again." Well, frankly, he did. He blasted through the stop-sign at the end of the street and barreled down towards my house. For the second time, sense escaped me and I met him in front of my house as he came by. I was just clearing the hedges so I pointed the staff at him as he roared by and yelled something superficially intelligent. Actually I think I un-abbreviated WTF! He blew by, went another 200 feet and brodied to a stop facing me, revving the motor.
I noticed this time that he had gathered an audience other than myself. The neighbor across the street was on his porch, and lights were coming on down both ways. I also noticed for the first time that at my neighbors three houses down on the left, a pick-up was sitting on the street with the tail gate down and a couple of kids were sitting on the back. My guess is that's where the biker genius had been when he left the first time, showing off.
Motor city madness was revving in the street, facing me while I was standing there wielding my would be samurai sword. He revved and popped the clutch bolting towards me with the front wheel off the ground again. I took up a proper Mickey Mantle posture ready to swing for the bleachers when he came by. I really don't know what would have happened had I actually hit him like that, whether he'd depart the saddle or my arms would depart the sockets, but I was ready none-the-less. At the last possible moment instead of swerving, this time he dropped the front wheel and brodied to a stop maybe three feet from me.
He was wearing one of those full face enduro type helmets so I couldn't see much of his face in the darkness. I could, however, see that he had black holes for eyes so I assumed the showing off was probably primed with something mind altering at the very least. Revving the engine one last time he killed it. I took the opportunity during the silence to ask him the $64,000 question..."Just what 'in the wild world of sports' do you think you are doing...dumbass?!!!"
He responded with just as note worthy of an answer..."What 'in the wild world of sports' business is it of yours?"
I explained I lived here, it was Sunday night, and if he was intent on killing himself in a drug induced frenzy, to kindly do it in someone Else's neighborhood. He said "fork you!" and I said "you first!" and smacked him soundly on top of his helmeted head with the cedar staff. Of course it did no physical harm, but I'm sure it rang his bell and thumped his eardrums good. His glazed eyes crossed once and he started with a "why you..." as he commenced to take his helmet off (stupid!!?), throw his leg off the bike, and grabs for a previously unseen pistol in the waste band of his britches, all at the same time.
It's at this particular moment that that strangest of all phenomena occurs for the gunfighter. All time seems to slow down to a frame by frame pace. This has happened to me before. I assume it happens to all who are entirely focused on the situation at hand, but I've no proof.
All I can tell you is that his helmet dropped onto the mirror, his right foot started lifting off the ground, his right hand reached for his waste band and I saw the gun all at the same instant. In that same instant I heard the staff clatter onto the pavement as I squinted down my pistol sites at the center of his forehead. I don't remember reaching for or drawing the weapon. It was just there.
He froze.
I saw terror in his eyes and heard the "oof" of breath expel from his lungs. I then heard my neighbor across the street yell, "Don't do it Keith! He ain't worth it!" A pregnant silence followed as we held our locked gaze for what seemed an eternity. He had his hand on the butt of his pistol, but had yet to pull it from his pants. One leg was still poised in mid-air as he balanced on the one foot on the ground. I had the Bersa in a wrist locked Weaver stance and she wasn't wavering. I saw his eyes lose contact with the bore of the pistol and focus on mine....I think he saw the resolve.
I gave it another eternity or two then simply said "Sit....ride". Much to his credit, and my salvation, he sat, pulled the helmet on, kicked the bike and split all in another four or five heartbeats.
I stood in the middle of the street for a moment or two before I realized my neighbor was standing at the sidewalk and talking to me. He told me to relax that the police had been called and were on the way. I nodded once, reached down and picked up my staff and walked back to the front porch. I placed my pistol on the hand rail in plain sight and sat on my front steps waiting for the law.
Several minutes later two patrol cars pulled up. One walked across the street to the neighbor who had called, the other came to my drive and asked if I was okay. I stated that I was and pointed at the pistol several feet away on the rail. He nodded once and stood there observing me without speaking again. I thought that a bit strange but kept my peace. After a few minutes of nodding and pointing my neighbor seemed to have spun his tale to his officer. Said officer then walked the half block up to the pick-up truck to interview the other observers of the show-down.
I couldn't classify my neighbor across the street as a friend, but I wouldn't go so far as to say he was an enemy either. Our kids hung out together over the years but he'd had some unsavory domestic episodes with his wife that kind of kept us from being pals. I wasn't sure what he had told the officer, but I knew for the most part, I was in the right. Excepting walking out for the confrontation in the first place.
The kids down the street were a different story. Their daddy was an old school redneck who's pappy was in the KKK and had run moonshine in years past. He ran street drags himself and we'd had words over the years about late night big blocks tacking out. I knew the kids (16yrs old or so) smoked some dope and were a general nuisance in the neighborhood, but not all bad. What they might tell the officers was completely unknown.
So I waited.
At one point, in a rather excitedly loud voice I heard one of the kids say.."he went for his pistol but Garth said Shoom!! and did a quick draw on him like I never seen".
The two officers then converged at the end of my driveway and talked for a couple of moments before the interviewer asked if he could approach the porch. I nodded at him, and he came on up.
My expectations at this point, having had run ins with the law a time or two over the years, was that they'd confiscate my weapon, take me into custody and I'd be explaining the aforementioned tale to a judge.
Instead he approached me at the bottom step and asked if I was okay. I repeated that I was and waited for his spiel. He looked down at his notes, looked at the pistol on the rail, and said this...
"So let me get this straight....kid was making an ass of himself at midnight on a Sunday, you come out to see what's going on, the kid tries to run you down with his bike, you jump, he comes around again and you smack him with a broom stick. He stops, tries to pull a pistol but you have one of your own, out draw him, get the drop, and he rides away...that sound about right?"
I said "Yep". He looks me in the eye, and says "Okay, you have a good night, sir" Spins around, approaches his partner, says "nothing here" and they leave.
My daughter and her beau pull up just as they are saddling up. She asks me what's going on, I told her I just called off the search patrol out looking for her. The look she gives me is priceless.....
